How much do you need to watch your calories?

The Food and Drug Administration will require all restaurants with 20 or more locations and many other places selling food to display the calorie information of each item, including vending machines. Does this mean you can walk around town adding up your daily calories and become healthy without much trouble? Unfortunately, no. More information about the food you eat is always a good thing, but counting calories alone isn’t enough, or even really necessary, when you plan your diet.

The newest FDA calorie regulations

The Food and Drug Administration rules affect all chain restaurants in America and mean each item on a menu you read will now have its calorie count next to it. In fact, the rules include much more than sit-down restaurants, you’ll see calorie counts for items sold at:

Drive-thru windows

Delivery places, like all pizza chains

Salad bars and buffets

Movie theater and amusement park concession stands

Ice cream stores

Coffee shop snacks

And more

The primary point is to avoid eating more calories than you’re aware of. While calorie counts in this setting are somewhat new, one published in the journal Health Affairs found that calorie counts did affect food choices shoppers made. However, it’s hard to tell how findings will scale up when pushed from a small area of New York City to the entire nation.

Calorie counters can put down the calculators

While counting your calories every day is not a bad thing in and of itself, it is by no means required for your health. Calories do not play as important a role in our health as the ways in which we get them.

If you eat 5 brownies, each with 400 calories, you’ll be at about 2,000 calories for the day. If 2,000 were your limit, you wouldn’t want to eat any other food that day but you’d be far from healthy. While chocolate can have its own benefits, don’t ever try the all-brownie diet.

It’s not the calories in the brownies that would be causing the problem necessarily. Brownies may contain a lot of sugar. Too much sugar in your diet leads to decreases in Insulin Efficiency and all sorts of other problems.

Where are your calories coming from?

How your body processes calories plays a major role as well. Take fructose, a form of sugar that is now commonly used as a sweetener or preservative as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and is also half of table sugar. Compared to glucose, a serving of fructose may have the same amount of calories, but the fructose calories are more likely to be turned to fat rather than metabolized for energy.

A healthy diet

You’re more likely to meet your health goals when you have a plan compared to making healthy choices on a whim. Obviously, the more control over your meals, the easier it is to stick to your diet. In fact, one study has shown that people who eat primarily home-cooked meals eat healthier at home as well as when eating out.

Of course, eating at a restaurant is something we all enjoy. In fact, according to a 2013 Rasmussen Report, 58% of Americans eat out for at least one meal a week. We get a lot of our calories outside the home, so having the information on calories at hand can be a big help.

However, you can make things even easier by simply sticking to some solid dietary guidelines, like having fruit and vegetables and protein at every meal, avoiding processed foods as much as possible and always trying to eat fresh.

The Olumia Life Nutrition plan can help even further. In fact, you can even use the Olumia Life app to find the overall best dishes available from menus around the country.

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Disclaimer: Consult with your physician or qualified healthcare professional before starting any new nutrition, exercise or sleep program. Information that has been demonstrated to be beneficial at a group level does not assure beneficial results for any specific individual utilizing the Information.